Nokia Lumia 925 review

The Lumia 925 is a slimmer, lighter update to the Lumia 920. The Lumia 920 was a beautifully-made unibody phone, but it did attract some criticism for its 185g weight. The 925 shaves off 46g, as well as 2mm in thickness, from the 920 and so is a much more svelte proposition.

Slimmer, lighter and more metal than the Lumia 920
Like the Lumia 920, the 925 is a sealed unit, but the design is significantly different. Instead of a solid polycarbonate shell, the phone's chassis is split into a coloured plastic rear and metal frame. We're not sure it feels as absolutely bombproof as the Lumia 920, but we're certainly fans of the metal frame; it's cool to the touch and makes the 925 more comfortable to hold for long periods than a phone with a plastic chassis.
The Lumia 925 has a 4.5in AMOLED display, with a 768x1,280 resolution. This isn’t up there with the 1,080x1,920 Full HD screens we’ve become used to seeing on top-end handsets such as the Sony Xperia Z and Samsung Galaxy S4, but it's an adequate number of pixels for the 925's slightly smaller screen. That's 332 pixels per inch (PPI), compared to 441PPI on the S4 or 326PPI on the iPhone 5.

It's not Full HD, but this is still an excellent display
The display has excellent image quality. As we normally see from AMOLED screens, blacks are properly black, and colours are beautifully saturated and vibrant. Side by side with a Samsung Galaxy S4, the Lumia 925 had whiter whites and more saturated colours, but couldn't match the S4 for viewing angles; tilting the screen away from vertical led to a slight blue cast on the 925's display. However, most people tend to use their phones straight on, so we can't see this being much of a problem.
Like the 920, the 925 has a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and 1GB RAM. This is more than adequate for running Windows Phone 8, and everything is beautifully smooth. The phone completed the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in 906ms, which is the fastest score we’ve seen, and renders complicated websites quickly.
However, we're not particularly keen on the browser, but this is mainly due to the way Windows Phone 8 works. While Android and iOS have browsers with dedicated back buttons, Windows Phone 8's version of Internet Explorer uses the phone's generic back button to go to the previous page. This is fine when you have the browser open, but if you go back to the main menu and then open IE again, it will go to the last page you visited, but you can’t then go back to the previous page. It's frustrating for those who do a lot of web surfing on their phones.
While we appreciate Windows Phone 8 as a slick and well-designed operating systems, problems such as that make it feel less flexible than Android. Another problem is the lack of apps. The situation is improving, but there's still nowhere near the range and sophistication available in other platforms' app stores. We're still missing Rightmove and Sky, but there is at least a decent BBC iPlayer app.

HERE Navigation gives you turn-by-turn navigation with both offline maps and search

Nokia sweetens the deal considerably, though, with its own apps. These include HERE Navigation, which gives you turn-by-turn navigation and, unlike Google Navigation, supports both offline maps and offline address searches, and Nokia Music, a large collection of free music playlists which can be streamed and listened to offline.

There were a couple we hadn’t seen before. Photobeamer is intriguing. This is a quick way to view photos stored on your phone in another device's web browser, without having to plug the phone in or sync with an online service. You load the app on your phone, go to www.photobeamer.com on the other device then scan the QR code presented on screen. Your photo will then appear in the other device's browser, and as you flick through the photos on your screen they also flick past in your browser. It's a very neat trick and a great way to show your photos on a bigger screen.
It's also the first time we've come across Nokia's Smart Cam app. This takes a sequence of photos every time you take a picture. You can then use this sequence to perform a number of fancy operations in the app. You can pick the best shot from the sequence (the phone picks what it thinks is the finest image automatically) and find faces, but the Action Shot and Remove Objects functions are particularly interesting.
Action Shot is for taking photos of people moving past the camera, such as a skateboarder, skier or a Beatles tribute at the Abbey Road crossing. It superimposes the sequence of images one of top of another, so depicting the subject's entire movement across the frame. You can toggle the option to make the images gradually fade out as they go back in time, for added artistic effect.

Use Action Shot to capture high-octane sports such as Office Walking
Remove Objects detects moving objects in an image, then gives you the option to remove them; as Smart Cam takes several photos of the same scene, it has enough information to fill in the background seamlessly. We found it particularly useful for removing cars, cyclists or people straying into shot.
We liked the Smart Camera features, but weren't blown away by the basic image quality from the 8.7-megapixel camera. Low-light images were reasonable, if not up there with the HTC One's, but daylight images from the standard camera were decidedly odd. Photos seemed over-processed, with overblown highlights and a turquoise rather than blue sky. It looked like excessive use of HDR, but we couldn’t find an HDR option to turn off.

Sunlight photos seem overblown and unnatural, and the sky definitely wasn't that colour
Photos taken with the Smart Cam app were better, with less wacky colours, but we found details were smudgy. It's far from the best camera we've seen; the Sony Xperia Z and HTC One's are significantly better for outdoor and indoor shots, respectively.

The Galaxy S4 (left) captures much more detail than the Lumia 925 (right)

The Lumia 925 improves on most aspects of the Lumia 920, which was already the best high-end Windows Phone 8 handset. We like the new, semi-metal chassis, the screen is superb and Nokia continues to impress with its innovative apps. If you're set on Windows Phone 8 this is the handset to buy, but, as with the 920, a lacklustre camera holds it back from an award.

Details
Part Code	Lumia 925
Review Date	17 Jun 2013
Price	£500
Rating

Hardware
Main display size	4.5in
Native resolution	768x1,280
CCD effective megapixels	8.7-megapixel
GPS
Internal memory	32768MB
Memory card support	none
Memory card included	0MB
Operating frequencies	GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Wireless data	HSDPA
Size	129x71x9mm
Weight	139g

Features
Operating system	Windows Phone 8
Microsoft Office compatibility	Word, Excel, PowerPoint
FM Radio
Accessories	headphones, USB cable, charger
Talk time	18 hours
Standby time	18 days

Buying Information
SIM-free price	£500
Price on contract	0
SIM-free supplier	www.expansys.com
Contract/prepay supplier	www.mobilephonesdirect.co.uk
Details	www.nokia.co.uk

[Continue reading...]

Samsung Galaxy Young review

The Galaxy Young is one of the cheapest Android phones we've seen. At £90 on O2 prepay, it's not quite as much of a bargain as the ZTE Kis, which is currently £45 on Virgin prepay from Argos, but it's certainly the cheapest phone we've seen SIM-free.

You get a good-looking phone for your money, which feels well made. We like the soft-touch plastic on the rear, which is similar to that of the Galaxy S3 and S4, and the silver sides manage to make the phone look classy rather than tacky. The Young is a compact handset, with a small 3.3in screen, but is a relatively chunky 12mm thick. We liked the extra thickness, as it meant we could keep a firm grip on the handset despite its small width and height.

Like many budget phones, the Young has a 320x480-pixel screen. For Android to look its razor-sharp best we like to see a minimum of 480x800 pixels, and the Galaxy Young's text is slightly on the blurry side. There's also a significant amount of grain, but the screen is certainly usable.

The Young runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. We’re used to the latest versions of Android running as smooth as silk, and the operating system runs well on the Galaxy Young - at least on the surface. The app tray comes up quickly and the animation to flick between app trays is smooth, but it's when you open an app that the limitations of the phone's single-core 1GHz processor start to show.
In the Chrome web browser, the BBC News website took nine seconds to render, while most dual-core smartphones can render the page in five. Scrolling around pages is far jerkier than we're used to, and there's a second or so delay between tapping in the address box and the keyboard appearing. The Maps app is also especially slow, especially when new tiles are loading, which makes scrolling around a chore.
The slow performance is backed up the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark; the phone completed the test in a very slow 3,203ms. The phone's slow speed does give it one particular advantage; good battery life. In our continuous video playback test, we saw nearly nine hours from the Young's 1,300mAh battery.
Core phone functions such as messaging are less of a problem. There is a bit of a delay between pressing a key on the on-screen keyboard and the letter appearing, but accurate typing is helped by the keyboard's sensible design; each key is small but spaced far apart from the others, so fat fingers don’t struggle with the screen's low resolution.

We were impressed with the phone's five-megapixel camera, which managed to resolve a surprising amount of detail from its three megapixels in outdoor shots, and compared favourably with the Samsung Galaxy S3's camera, which we tend to use for our reference. However, like the S3, the Galaxy Young struggles with exposure in bright conditions, meaning that the sky is more likely to be a bleached-out white than something with texture and clouds. Photos taken in low light show plenty of noise, but again, are reasonably impressive considering the phone's low price.

Not bad on the detail front, but the camera struggles with exposure in bright conditions
The phone's slow speed does give it one particular advantage; good battery life. In our continuous video playback test, we saw nearly nine hours from the Young's 1,300mAh battery.

It's difficult to rate the Galaxy Young. On the one hand, you won’t find a fully-featured Android 4.1 phone for less SIM-free. On the other, it's slow to the point of frustration at times. We'd recommend picking your carrier in advance, then buying a better handset with a prepay subsidy, such as the great-value Vodafone Smart III.

Details
Part Code	GT-S6310N
Review Date	17 Jun 2013
Price	£116
Rating

Hardware
Main display size	3.3in
Native resolution	320x480
CCD effective megapixels	3-megapixel
GPS
Internal memory	1536MB
Memory card support	microSD
Memory card included	0MB
Operating frequencies	GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 900/2100
Wireless data	HSDPA
Size	109x59x12mm
Weight	112g

Features
Operating system	Android 4.1 (JellyBean)
Microsoft Office compatibility	Word, Excel, PowerPoint
FM Radio
Accessories	headphones, data cable, charger
Talk time	7 hours
Standby time	10 days

Buying Information
SIM-free price	£116
Price on contract	0
Prepay price	£90
SIM-free supplier	www.ballicom.co.uk
Contract/prepay supplier	www.o2.co.uk
Details	www.samsung.co.uk

[Continue reading...]

LG Optimus L3 II review

The LG Optimus L3 II is one of the cheapest smartphones around. It’s the most basic model of LG’s inexpensive Optimus L range and you can get it from just £90 SIM-free. Although it's cheap, it runs an up-to-date version of Android, 4.1.2 Jellybean.
It’s quite short and stocky, and its bulk makes it feel much heavier than its 107g weight. We didn’t mind this, though, as the extra heft makes it feel more durable and better made than its flimsy, plastic pop-off back might suggest. Its curved corners make it very easy to hold, too, and it’s small enough to use comfortably with one hand.

It’s not the fastest smartphone we’ve ever seen and we experienced a slight jerkiness when scrolling through its various menu options and when we opened up apps. It’s certainly slower than what we’d normally expect from a 1GHz single-core processor, and it showed in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks. It completed the test in 2,306ms, which is quite sluggish compared to most other budget phones.
It’s not particularly good for playing 3D games either, as we couldn’t even install our usual 3DMark graphics benchmark tests. It will still run games like Temple Run 2 and Angry Birds, but anything more taxing is likely to produce a significant slowdown in frame rate.

The Optimus L3 II's 3.2in screen also made web browsing quite frustrating, as it only has a tiny 320x240 resolution. We had to zoom right in on desktop web pages to make the text legible, and even then there was a slight delay in the text becoming clear enough to read from its mass of blurry pixels. Zipping through image-heavy pages wasn’t one of its strong suites either, but at least its responsive touchscreen alleviated the pain a little with smooth pinch-zooming and finger-scrolling gestures.
However, the low resolution also means using standard Android apps isn't as comfortable as it could be. For example, reading email or looking at the calendar, isn't as good as on phones with higher resolutions.

The screen’s overall image quality is fairly average. Solid blacks weren’t particularly deep and colours lacked the rich vibrancy of slightly more expensive phones. It also had fairly low contrast, but flaws like these are easily forgiven considering the L3 II’s price.
With such a small screen to power, we had hoped this might translate into a longer battery life, but its 1,540mAh battery lasted just 5 hours and 58 minutes in our video playback test with the screen set to half brightness. This would be a poor score for any phone, even at this price, and we’ve seen other budget handsets last over 11 hours under the same conditions.
Typing was more problematic. With so little space available, the keys felt a little cramped. We were still able to type relatively accurately, but typing at speed produced a lot of mistakes. We liked the main layout of the keyboard, though, as we didn’t have to access a second keyboard layout to get numbers or different types of punctuation; instead, just hold the relevant letter key down to access the number or punctuation character you want.

LG hasn’t made too many alterations to the operating system, but we wouldn’t expect much customisation at this price. Besides, stock Android is so good that customisations can often ruin the entire experience. There are five home screens and its drop-down quick setting buttons can be rearranged and customised to your liking, but strangely this doesn’t include its main settings. Instead, it’s relegated to a tiny button below the brightness settings, which is much less obvious.
The L3 II’s 3.2-megapixel camera was equally disappointing. Even in bright sunshine, our outdoor shots came out looking quite cool and dull, and there were great swathes of each photo where the pixels blurred together. It fared better indoors, but any increased sharpness soon dulled when it tried to cope with lower lighting conditions. Recording video was equally blurry, but we were pleased to see that its voice recognition feature worked without a hitch, allowing us to take photos with our voice instead of having to hit the on-screen shutter button.

There's no denying that the LG Optimus L3 II is very cheap. At just £90 SIM-free, it's one of the cheapest phones that we've ever seen. However, we'd suggest caution, as the small screen size, low resolution and sluggish processor all count against this smartphone. Spend a little bit more money and you can get a much better smartphone, such as the Budget Buy-winning Huawei Ascend G510.

Details
Part Code	LG-E430
Review Date	16 Jun 2013
Price	£90
Rating

Hardware
Main display size	3.2in
Native resolution	320x240
CCD effective megapixels	3.15-megapixel
GPS
Internal memory	4092MB
Memory card support	microSD
Memory card included	0MB
Operating frequencies	GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 900/2100
Wireless data	GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, HSUPA
Size	102x61x12mm
Weight	107g

Features
Operating system	Android 4.1.2 (JellyBean)
Microsoft Office compatibility	none
FM Radio
Accessories	headphones, data cable, charger
Talk time	10 hours
Standby time	29 days

Buying Information
Price on contract	£17 per month, 24-month contract
Prepay price	£80
SIM-free supplier	N/A
Contract/prepay supplier	www.o2.co.uk
Details	www.lg.com

[Continue reading...]

Sony Xperia Z review

The Xperia Z is Sony's flagship phone for this year, and continues the screen size and resolution arms race with its 5in, 1,920x1,080 display. It also has all the specifications you would expect from a high-end smartphone, including a quad-core 1.5GHz processor and a camera with a huge 13-megapixel sensor.

The display's Full HD resolution is the same as that of this year's HTC One, but the slightly larger screen size should make text more legible at this resolution. We found we could view web pages in desktop mode and still read all the page's text easily without zooming in. This is a trick that the HTC One also pulls off, but we found the Xperia Z's extra 1/3 inch screen size made reading more comfortable.

Browsing desktop web pages without zooming in is possible on the 5in 1,920x1,080 display
The display is hugely bright, but we did notice some slight light leakage around the edges when looking at large blocks of black. The screen also suffers in comparison to AMOLED screens such as that of the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, which has far deeper blacks. It's still an impressive display, though, and seeing as no smartphone has an AMOLED screen of both this size and resolution it would be churlish to complain.
The display's certainly good enough, and large enough, for watching films and for gaming. We tried it out with the Asphalt 7 racing title, which looked fantastic, and almost like something off the PlayStation 3.
To accommodate such a big display, the handset is understandably huge, and you'll struggle to use it while carrying an umbrella. It's only 3mm wider than the HTC One and has a larger screen, though, so the Xperia Z isn’t excessively large as this generation of smartphones goes. A screen this big also requires a large battery to power it, and Sony has gone for a chunky 2,330mAh model - very similar to the 2,300mAh battery in the HTC One. Unfortunately, despite having such a big battery, the huge screen takes its toll. The phone managed 5h 48m in our continuous video playback battery life test, which is below average, showing this is one Android phone that will require regular charging.
Sony has taken a different approach to HTC when it comes to the phone's design. Instead of the HTC One's all-aluminium body, the Xperia Z is all about the glass front and rear. Sony is tight-lipped about the kind of glass it uses, but leaks from a Sony press conference suggest it has toughened Dragontrail glass on the front and the more common Corning Gorilla Glass on the rear. It does look good, but we didn’t find it as comfortable to hold as the HTC One with its rounded edges and cool burnished aluminium.

You could never say it was ugly, but we think HTC has trumped the Xperia Z with its aluminium One
The Xperia Z does have a party trick, though; it's fully sealed against water and dust ingress, so will survive a rain shower or a drop from a top pocket into the toilet. The flaps covering its various ports are rubber-sealed and feel very sturdy when they clip in and out, so we're not too worried about them breaking off.
The Xperia Z runs Android 4.1, rather than the very latest 4.2 version. However, Sony claims that version 4.2 will be available for the Xperia Z "shortly after launch".
Even though it's now a few months since the Xperia Z was launched and we're yet to see the update, it's definitely on the way. A leaked version of Sony's Android 4.2.2 build has surfaced, and it has been successfully installed on an Xperia Z by one of the developers on www.xda-developers.com. The update will, of course, only work on handsets with unlocked bootloaders, but it does at least show that the 4.2 update is nearly here.
It's an update worth waiting for, as Android 4.2 brings several important improvements. You can now see widgets such as the calendar on the lock screen, so you can check your appointments without typing in your pin, and perform common functions straight from the notification bar; for example, if you have a missed call, you can call back or message the contact straight from the notification.
In the meantime, we have absolutely no complaints about the phone's performance. It may have scored a relatively slow 1,890ms in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, compared to under 1,000ms for the fastest phones, but its 1.5GHz quad-core processor runs Android smoothly without any jerkiness or hiccups. We ran the test again using the Dolphin browser rather than the Xperia Z's default Chrome, and the score improved to a much more respectable 1,357ms - the current mobile version of Chrome does seem to struggle with the Sunspider benchmark.
Sony's customisations to the operating system are tasteful; a large chunk of the homescreen is dedicated to a huge Sony Entertainment Network link/advert, but this is easy to remove if you don’t like the look of it.
Depending on how you like to use Android, you may prefer Sony's light-touch customisations to the rip-it-up-and-start-again of the latest version of HTC Sense, which turns your entire homescreen into a giant news feed from your social networks and various content providers.

Apart from the (removable) advert for the Sony Entertainment Network, Sony's Android customisations are fairly unobtrusive
We were impressed with the Xperia Z's keyboard; the screen is large enough that it’s easy to type accurately and quickly. At first, having to switch to the second-screen of buttons to access the full stop and comma keys annoyed us, but it's easy to customise the keyboard layout with the keyboard settings wizard, which gives you the choice of turning on comma and full stop keys, and adding punctuation as a long-press to each key.

Sony has made sure you can get the keyboard layout you like
The Xperia Z's 13-megapixel camera uses an Exmor RS sensor, which is designed to be particularly impressive in low light. Compared side-by-side with a Motorola RAZR i's camera, which is a fairly standard smartphone model, under low light the Xperia Z's sensor produced brighter images with far more detail.
Under indoor lighting conditions, when compared side by side with photos taken with the Samsung Galaxy S3, the Xperia Z really shone. This is one of the few phones we’ve seen that can take sharp photos indoors, and we saw very little noise or evidence of excessive noise reduction. It's very impressive.

Impressive focus and little noise indoors – CLICK TO ENLARGE
Outside, we were impressed with how the Xperia Z handled exposure; many phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S3, bleach out the sky, but the Xperia Z's camera picked up individual clouds. Colours are accurate, but for sheer amount of detail you can't beat the Galaxy S3; it picked up significantly more detail than the Xperia Z's camera, making images more lifelike.


Great exposure, but the Samsung Galaxy S3's camera picks up more detail outside

We also ran our new indoor video tests on the Xperia Z's camera. We've set up a test scene in a camera tent in order to see how smartphone cameras perform under different lighting conditions, and how they deal with movement. We video the scene with the room lights switched on and with additional illumination from lights positioned at the side, then with the side lights only and finally with no lights at all apart from some moving LEDs.
The Xperia Z performed very well in this test, with surprisingly little noise in the footage. It also coped well with the LEDs in the scene - many phones flare out the strong light source, but the Xperia Z didn’t have this problem. The one major drawback was that the phone struggled to keep focus in low light during the test, instead hunting around for a focal point.

The Sony Xperia Z has the looks and the high-resolution screen to make it a worthy high-end smartphone. Currently, at least until the Samsung Galaxy S4 is released, its main competition is the similarly huge-screened HTC One. We prefer the HTC One's aluminium body, but if you don’t like the sweeping changes HTC has made to Android with its new Sense interface, you may prefer the more lightly-customised Xperia Z.

We're suckers for metal phones, so the HTC One is our choice for the moment. However, a more in-depth test of the HTC One's camera - so seeing how Sony's 16 megapixels stack up against HTC's four "Ultrapixels" - may well change our minds.

Details
Part Code	Xperia Z
Review Date	14 Jun 2013
Price	£500
Rating

Hardware
Main display size	5.0in
Native resolution	1,920x1,080
CCD effective megapixels	13-megapixel
GPS
Internal memory	16384MB
Memory card support	microSD
Memory card included	0MB
Operating frequencies	GSM 850/900/1800/1900, LTE bands 1, 3, 5, 8
Wireless data	HSDPA+, LTE
Size	139x71x8mm
Weight	146g

Features
Operating system	Android 4.1 (JellyBean)
Microsoft Office compatibility	Word, Excel, PowerPoint
FM Radio
Accessories	stereo headset, charger, USB cable
Talk time	11 hours
Standby time	23 days

Buying Information
SIM-free price	£500
Price on contract	0
SIM-free supplier	www.handtec.co.uk
Contract/prepay supplier	www.buymobilephones.net
Details	www.sonymobile.co.uk

[Continue reading...]

Sony Xperia L review

The Xperia L is Sony's mid-range handset for this year, slotting in under the powerful Xperia SP and flagship Xperia Z. It's currently fairly expensive on contract but, at less than £225 SIM-free, you get an awful lot of phone for your money.

The handset doesn't have a spectacular specification, but it all works well as a package. You get a 1GHz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM and Android 4.1 - not much on paper, compared to the near-2GHz monsters we're now seeing on premium smartphones, but we've no complaints about the handset's performance. Apps open and shut with a snap and animations are silky-smooth.
As we expected, the phone's performance in our Sunspider 1.0 JavaScript benchmark wasn't spectacular. It completed the test in 2,646ms using the default Chrome browser, which is twice as long as we saw from the Xperia SP with its 1.7GHz dual-core chip. Chrome is slow in Sunspider, but even with the faster Dolphin browser we only saw 1,564ms, which is very much a middling result.
Subjectively, this average benchmark score didn’t make much difference to the phone's web browsing performance. The Maps app glides smoothly under your finger, and there's barely a hesitation while panning smoothly around web pages - only a barely perceptible slowdown when scrolling past a large image. When compared side by side with a Samsung Galaxy S3, the more powerful S3 had slightly smoother browsing, but there's not much in it.
You shouldn’t have a problem with gaming, as the Xperia L's processor produced a competent performance in the 3DMark benchmark. 4074 is a much better score than we expect to see from a phone at this price, and is up with much more expensive phones such as the HTC One X+. It's also quicker in 3D games than the Samsung Galaxy S3, showing you're getting better 3D performance than last year's premium handsets.

We were also impressed with the Xperia L's screen. Again, its 854x480 resolution is pretty standard for a phone at this price, and you have to zoom in to read text on web pages, but we saw bright whites and punchy colours. The Xperia L's LCD display doesn’t have the true blacks of an AMOLED screen, but blacks are still very deep. It's a high-quality display for a relatively inexpensive handset.

The phone's design certainly divided opinion in the office. In an era of slimmer smartphones, it's unashamedly chunky, with a large chin and a concave back with a pleasing rubberised finish. The phone's protruding edges make it feel like it would survive most tumbles, as the screen would be protected unless you dropped the phone straight on its face.
However, some weren't sure about the hard edges at the bottom of the handset, which can dig into your hand - we think it's something you'll quickly get used to, and is only really a problem if you're used to a phone with rounded edges such as the Galaxy S3.

As with the Xperia SP and Xperia Z, Sony has made extensive customisations to the Xperia L's version of Android. This may offend Android purists, but we find the changes to be tasteful and useful. We particularly like the drop-down box that lets you sort your apps by Most Used or Recently Installed.

Some of Sony's customisations are welcome, such as being able to rearrange the app tray easily
Sony bills the Xperia L as the "camera experts’ camera phone", and we were impressed by the performance of its backside-illuminated camera sensor. A backside-illuminated sensor has the sensor's circuitry on the rear rather than at the front, so there's no wiring in the way of light reaching the sensor.

Plenty of detail and not much noise under very challenging lighting
This should lead to better image quality under low light, and the Xperia L takes some of the best low-light photos we've seen, with far more detail and less than noise than the Samsung Galaxy S4's shots. Daylight photos were acceptable if not spectacular. Contrast was impressive, with no sign of overexposure in lighter areas even on a sunlit day, but details became muddy when we zoomed in, showing the limits of the Xperia L's eight megapixels.

Well-exposed daylight shots, but some muddy detail
Video quality was acceptable under reasonable lighting, but under low light the frame rate dropped right down, making footage seriously jerky - this isn’t a phone to film gigs or nights out.

We were impressed with the Xperia L. It has a good screen and a fast operating system, as well as excellent low-light photo (if not video) performance. It's not especially cheap on contract, but provided you're willing to pay for the phone up-front, there's nothing that can touch it for less than £300. It's a Budget Buy.

Details
Part Code	Xperia L
Review Date	12 Jun 2013
Price	£224
Rating
Award	Budget Buy

Hardware
Main display size	4.3in
Native resolution	854x480
CCD effective megapixels	8-megapixel
GPS
Internal memory	8192MB
Memory card support	microSD
Memory card included	0MB
Operating frequencies	GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 900/2100
Wireless data	HSDPA
Size	129x65x10mm
Weight	137g

Features
Operating system	Android 4.1.2 (JellyBean)
Microsoft Office compatibility	Word, Excel, PowerPoint
FM Radio
Accessories	headphones, data cable, charger
Talk time	8 hours
Standby time	498 days

Buying Information
SIM-free price	£224
Price on contract	0
SIM-free supplier	www.handtec.co.uk
Contract/prepay supplier	www.buymobilephones.net
Details	www.sonymobile.co.uk

[Continue reading...]

Blackberry Q10 review

If losing the keyboard on the BlackBerry Z10 was a step too far for most BlackBerry users, the keyboard-equipped Blackberry Q10 is here to put them at ease. It’s the second phone in BlackBerry’s 2013 arsenal to run the new BlackBerry 10 OS, and our initial impressions were promising.
BUILD AND DESIGN
Thanks to its slim 10mm waistline, its stocky exterior feels modern and professional. The textured pattern on its non-slip rubber back gives it a little more personality as well, and its smooth, curved frame made it very comfortable to hold and use.

We quite look the look and feel of this phone, even though the Q10 is a rather traditional looking smartphone. One area where the Q10 has really changed compared to previous BlackBerry models with a keyboard is with the larger screen. A 3.1in Super AMOLED display occupies a much larger space on the phone and it looks fantastic. It has a 720x720 resolution, giving it a high pixel density of 331ppi. We found colours were bright and vivid with very deep blacks. Whites had a slightly yellowish tone, but the screen's contrast levels were good, even on half brightness settings.
Of course, part of reason why the screen looks and feels so large is due to the removal of the sensor button. This might seem unthinkable on a BlackBerry keyboard handset, but the Q10’s new touch-orientated BlackBerry 10 OS makes it more or less redundant. All of your apps are arranged on four main screens, and you swipe left and right to access them. It feels just as slick as Android, but the ‘Home’ gesture (swiping up from the bottom of the screen) adds an extra degree of flexibility. This takes you to a separate app tray that lets you dive between different apps you currently have running as well as return to the main app screens. We particularly liked how the internet browser also adopts a thumbnail approach with your most visited web pages, making it that much easier to surf through your favourite sites without having to type in the addresses every time.

Messaging takes place in the BlackBerry Hub, which is just a left swipe away from the main home screen. Here you can access your text messages, email accounts and voicemail from a list on the side of the screen. There's also an integrated inbox, so you can see all of your messages in one place. It’s far more sophisticated than anything else we’ve seen so far on Android and iOS and its clear and simple layout makes it even more accessible to first time users.
KEYBOARD
Tying it all together is the Q10’s QWERTY keyboard. It takes up less space than on previous BlackBerry handsets, but we found it very easy to type on. Each key has a curved ridge down the side to help give your thumbs a bit of extra grip and to stop you from mashing multiple keys at the same time, and we were able to type quickly and accurately after a few minutes.

Unfortunately, when we did make mistakes, we found they were very fiddly to correct if they were in the middle of a sentence. With no sensor button or arrow keys built into the keyboard, we had to rely on the touchscreen to jump to different parts of our message. It was generally very responsive for flicking through web pages and swiping round its operating system, but it was far less sensitive when it came to tapping precise points on the screen. On several occasions, it either failed to register our touch completely or activated something else nearby, such as the onscreen attachment button. The auto-correct feature goes some way to help keep this problem to a minimum, but it’s not perfect.
HARDWARE
On the whole, though, we had very few problems during day to day use. Its 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM completed our SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks in a relatively quick 1,483ms, and we were able to render the BBC News home page in just 4 seconds. Due to the screen's comparatively low resolution, we still had to zoom in to read desktop versions web pages, but we were impressed by its smooth handling of image-heavy pages. We only experienced a very small amount of jerky movement when we were zoomed in, and the Q10 was able to load images without any major delay.
We weren’t able to run our normal 3D Mark benchmarks as they’re incompatible with BlackBerry 10 OS, but there’s still a decent range of games available through the BlackBerry World app. This is BlackBerry’s version of the Google Play Store, but as we discovered with the Z10, its current range of apps still has a long way to go before it’s anywhere near as extensive as its Android and iOS rivals.
Instead, its main strength lies in its pre-installed productivity apps, such as Docs To Go and Print to Go. The former lets you create and edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents as well as view PowerPoint presentations, while Print To Go lets you send files and printouts wirelessly from your computer to your phone as a PDF file. Print To Go was a little fiddly to set up, but after we installed the software on our PC and paired it with our phone, it worked perfectly.
CAMERA
We found the Q10's 8-megapixel camera disappointing. We were pleased we could alter the aspect ratio from its box-like 1:1 to either 4:3 or 16:9 in its menu settings, but while our outdoor shots were very sharp and clear, colours were generally quite inaccurate. It lost a lot of the finer detail in each shot as well due to colours appearing quite dark and muddy even in bright sunshine. Our indoor shots fared better, but it didn’t cope well in lower lighting conditions. Objects appeared very blurry and there was a considerable increase in the amount of noise.
Capturing video was also quite poor. In our still life test it rendered the fur of our toy monkey very well, but colours were too warm and the lens had to refocus every couple of seconds. It also seemed to reflect the light of our LED fan back onto the lens, producing a distracting ghosting effect on the other side of the screen. Noise was another issue as the whole image began to shimmer when we turned the lights off.

BATTERY LIFE
Thankfully, the Q10 redeemed itself somewhat with its superb battery life as its 2,100mAH battery lasted a massive 13 hours and 45 minutes in our video playback tests with the screen set to half brightness. Its everyday battery life was also impressive. We set it up to sync with three email accounts with the Wi-Fi left on and we managed a full working day with time to spare, so it shouldn’t need as much charging if you need it to need it to last into the evening.
CONCLUSION

The BlackBerry Q10 is certainly a worthy alternative to the Z10 if a keyboard is one of your top priorities, but it comes with a hefty premium. At £36-per-month on a 24-month contract, the Q10 is one of the most expensive smartphones currently available, and at this price we expect perfection. We love the new BlackBerry 10 operating system and its messaging hub, but its fickle touchscreen just isn’t good enough, especially compared to the Ultimate award-winning Samsung Galaxy S4. Still, if you’re set on having a physical keyboard and don’t mind putting up with its flaws, then the Q10 is a good choice.

Details
Part Code	BlackBerry Q10
Review Date	10 Jun 2013
Price	£560
Rating

Hardware
Main display size	3.1in
Native resolution	720x720
CCD effective megapixels	8-megapixel
GPS
Internal memory	16384MB
Memory card support	microSD
Memory card included	0MB
Operating frequencies	GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 850/900/1900/2100, LTE 800/900/1800/2100/2600
Wireless data	EDGE, HSPA+, LTE
Size	119x67x10mm
Weight	139g

Features
Operating system	BlackBerry 10 OS
Microsoft Office compatibility	Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF viewers
FM Radio
Accessories	headset, charger, data cable
Talk time	14 hours
Standby time	14 days

Buying Information
SIM-free price	£560
Price on contract	£36 per month, 24-month contract
SIM-free supplier	www.handtec.co.uk
Contract/prepay supplier	www.vodafone.co.uk
Details	www.blackberry.com

[Continue reading...]